Sue gave us this powerful and moving speech at our AGM on Saturday 20th November 2021.
In Scotland in 2021, we should expect that everyone has a roof over their head, warmth and food on the table. We shouldn’t have to rely on the charity of strangers to feed us and support us. We should have these things as a right in our society. And yet we don’t.
Women for Independence knows that in amongst all the poverty stats and the poverty articles one thing is clear – Women bear the brunt of poverty in this country and all around the world. COP26 has underlined the issues around climate change and inequality and whilst it appeared that women had space to have their voices heard at the conference it remained largely a male-dominated space. 10 out of the 12 UK leadership positions were held by men and despite 80% of those displaced around the world forced into poverty and destitution due to climate change being women, women were and continue to be underrepresented in climate change discussions and negotiations.
Here in the UK, women continue to carry the burden of poverty. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 2018 said that 5.2 million women were in poverty in the UK, compared to 4.4 million men. We know that women get a raw deal compared to men across a whole spectrum of things. Last week – along with moaning MPs and cheery poverty busting Pudsey it was also Equal Pay Day. The day that effectively marks the day that women start to work for free because of the gender pay gap. There were lots of articles about that too. Lots of ideas on how to ‘protect yourself’.
The Express suggested that “women are advised to discuss parenting, roles and responsibilities and caring duties with their partner to understand each other’s expectations” and that “Career breaks mean a woman will not benefit from workplace pension contributions, and so this should be actively considered so the individual stays on track for retirement”. Not sure why none of these say “pay women more, pay them better and stop discriminating against them”, which would seem to be the best advice, if you ask me.
This is all very interesting, but for many women equal pay is not the issue. Pensions and career breaks, supportive husbands and open and transparent pay scales matter very little because in reality the burden of poverty is carried by women at the bottom end of the labour market where these things don’t make one iota of difference.
Prior to the pandemic, more women than ever were in work. 70% of women were working. However, women are still more likely to work in low paid sectors, such as caring, retail and hospitality. There has been little change for younger women too – while over 90% of construction and engineering apprentices are male, more than 90% of dental nursing and beauty therapy apprentices are female.
It seems that the potential for a life in poverty is set before we even leave school.
We know that women are still more likely to be the ones who take time off work when their children are young and often stay in part time work for many years after that. Managing paid work and caring for children is more difficult for lone parents – who are still overwhelmingly women. I spoke to women over the course of this year that had to give up work because they couldn’t afford the childcare. That happened to me in 2002 when I left my first husband. It happened to me in 2009 after I had a baby. It’s incredible to me that this is still happening to women in 2021.
The break-up of a family often causes emotional and financial hardship for mothers, fathers and children. The vast majority of lone parents are women and 44% live in poverty. We know this – I’m surely not telling all you wonderful women here anything we don’t know and yet we still have this gender disparity. Part of the reason for this is that we have a benefits system which is by design, cruel, punitive and designed to discriminate against women.
Universal Credit has seen us move backwards with its determination to mimic the 1950’s family wage model.
A single household payment for families ignores the fact that in 2021 nearly 75 per cent of mothers are in paid work in their own right with their own money – why on earth doesn’t UC replicate that? It insists on dividing earners into a main earner and a main carer. Again – reinforcing this 1950’s ideal of the typical family. Why men and women can’t share the responsibility of caring for children and both restrict their hours is a bit of a Universal Credit mystery.
For young women who are single parents they receive a lower rate of Universal credit. This didn’t happen in the previous system. Do they really think the responsibilities or pressures of motherhood is different for young women than for those of us that are older? Help with childcare costs often needs to be paid up front and the delays in payments from UC which reimburses parents often leads to a wait of weeks and can cause rent and bills to pile up.
Three quarters of the households subject to the benefit cap are lone parents and the vast majority of these will be women. Often these families struggle to find affordable housing and whilst lone parents of babies and toddlers are not required to work, they still are subject to the benefit cap. Families who are working can be capped because of the day of the month they are paid and this can often cause deprivation for women – especially in the run up to Christmas when wages may be paid early.
Universal Credit limits the additional child payments to two children but there is an exemption which applies if your third child is conceived through rape. I find it really difficult to even write that down, never mind say it out loud. It’s an immoral and impracticable rule and it targets women by forcing them to relive trauma and disclose intimate personal details that they may not have chosen to share. For those women that have not been raped there is more than a whiff of the woman being “no better than she ought to be” if she’s been so loose as to have three children. And believe me as a mother of five children (not all living at home thank goodness) I absolutely know about this attitude, having experienced it several times.
Finally, sanctions are continuing to cause problems for women and whilst it’s difficult to know the figures, the most recent report I have seen suggested that since lockdown ended the number of sanctions has increased by 14000 in three months and is rising. Those women who need to restrict their availability for work because of caring responsibilities continue to find it difficult to make that work with Universal credit.
During the pandemic the burden of home schooling fell largely on women. The increase in costs associated with this was felt most keenly by households on low incomes – the increase in heating costs and food – feeding teenagers is hard enough on a low income never mind when they are at home 24/7 for weeks and weeks.
What these bleak facts don’t portray however is the burden women carry as result. Evidence tells us that women often bear more of the daily stress of trying to make an inadequate income stretch far enough. Parents make daily sacrifices to protect their children from the effects of poverty, but the evidence suggests that it is most often the women who juggle the family budget, and women who go without to be able to meet their children’s needs.
For many women, poor housing, increased heating costs, and particularly the cost of the school day with parties, christmas hampers and book fairs (book fairs – the one thing that I won’t miss now my children are both at High school) this can all add up to more pressures on family budgets.
So what can we do? What can we, as informed Women for Independence, do about this?
Well, we can sell the benefits of independence as a way to more effectively tackle poverty and particularly change the way benefits are administered, so that the power over the design and delivery of Universal credit and other benefits lies in Scotland.
We can promote our “Womanifesto” – putting women right at the heart of economic recovery as we come out of the pandemic.
But we must also push for change now – several organisations have written to Kate Forbes asking that she increase the child payment to £20 per child when she announces the budget next month. This is really important. And each of us as individuals should look at how we can put pressure on the Scottish Government to do this.
Finally we must all understand poverty and talk about it with people we know. I blog about many independence and other social issues. After one blog, a woman I know very well and like very much sent me a message on Facebook telling me that I don’t understand how people “fiddle the system” and that poverty isn’t really poverty. I very clearly and quickly put her right. The stigma that surrounds poverty really prevents people speaking out about their experiences in an open way so I’m going to share some lived experience here and hope that will encourage and enable others to speak up and speak out about poverty wherever and whenever we can.
Poverty has been my constant companion over the last thirty years.
It’s not always walked beside me. Sometimes its stalked me from a distance – sometimes a far distance – sometimes with its hand on my shoulder but always, always close by, a pay packet away, a lost job away, a click of the electricity meter away as it moves onto the emergency credit a day earlier than I need it to do. And it’s worth noting that in those thirty years I have worked pretty much the whole time. I had four years when I didn’t work after I had my last two children, but I have worked, studied and got a degree, I have been married twice, I’ve been a single parent, I have been a carer, I have worked two jobs, I have owned my own home and I have been a council tenant, and a private tenant.
As a woman, as a single parent I have not eaten so my kids can eat, I have cut up old fleeces to use as period products, I have almost lost my home, I have taken insecure low paid jobs to make ends meet and gone to bed worrying if I’ll have electricity when I wake up in the morning and I’ve sent the children to school without a hot drink because we haven’t had electricity.
I have felt keenly the stigma of poverty even from well meaning people – Living in a rural community meant topping my electricity key up at the only shop. If I bought £5 the woman behind the counter would say “Tough week this week?” if I topped up thirty pounds she would say “Ohhh flush this week?” She wasn’t being cruel but she made me feel like I was living in a goldfish bowl, everyone knew my business and was laughing at me. I stopped going out, I stopped looking at people, I felt ashamed.
The stigma of poverty has haunted me – it has shamed me and damaged my mental health. Research I did a couple of years ago showed that people living in rural poverty have the lowest levels of mental wellbeing even compared to people living in poverty in deprived urban areas of our country. Poor women often exclude themselves from school boards, pre- school activities, mother and baby groups because of stigma – because of the fear that they will be judged.
And it continues. Although working, my husband has been a carer for his dad for the last three years and after his work stopped as a result of the pandemic and Dad became more unwell, he has therefore been unable to work. I worked two jobs over the summer and my husband picked up some days here and there but that has all stopped. This week I went to the Co op and bought broccoli at 13p a pack and a stewpack at 10p a pack and topped the electricity meter up and made a gallon (literally) of soup and filled my freezer. I’m hunkering down and getting on with it. That’s what women do. We get on with it. But you know – the stress around poverty, the threat of poverty is likely to mean that I will die sooner than I would have if poverty hadn’t been my constant companion.
We, as Women for Independence, must call on the Scottish Government to do as much as they possibly can to reduce the effects of poverty now – but we know that it is Independence that will give us the opportunity to build a better fairer society.
If we are to encourage a vote for Independence for Scotland – women must be at the heart of that. Our Women for Indy Womanifesto absolutely does that. It centres women in a way that many discussions on the economy fail to do. We must share this widely and raise the voices of women to highlight the benefits of Independence. In all this and in going forward into a referendum and to an Independent Scotland, we must ensure that the voices of women with lived experience of poverty are at the heart of the work we do in understanding the impact of poverty and developing the solutions.